Ritual slaughter: reducing animals' pain is not a war on religious freedom

A lot of people are saying that the debate over ritual slaughter is about religious freedom. I don't see that it is. The detail suggests it's a debate over whether or not you think animals should suffer unnecessarily – and, happily, there is a way of protecting religious freedom while reducing pain.

If the scientific evidence is that it hurts excessively, what should be done? Well, a ban on ritual slaughter would be wrong and is, thankfully, unnecessary. All we have to do is require that the animal is stunned before it is killed. According to our report, most animals killed for halal are dispatched this way anyway – so why is the fuss? Surely a religious person would want to minimize the suffering of an innocent creature, and legislating for stunning is a fair compromise that avoids the authoritarian Danish law that bans ritual slaughter outright. In addition, let's label food so that people know how the animal involved died – and not just by ritual killing but also shooting, gassing, electrocution or drowning. If we all understand how our food is produced, we might be a little more discriminate about what we eat.

Because this isn't about picking on religious minorities – it's about a general concern for the way that we treat the creatures that God has given us stewardship over. As Harry writes, sometime in the future we may come to regard slaughterhouse practices as barbaric, too. And they are. The recent scandal over the sale of horse meat is a reminder that we often don't appreciate what's involved in food preparation and that some parts of the food chain remain unregulated and plain cruel. Think of battery hens confined in cages so small they can't spread their wings, veal calves contained with a space so tiny that they have to lie in their own feces, or the animals subjected to long, tortuous journeys across Europe as part of the live transport business. All of these things are, by any secular or religious definition, vile.

Why, oh why a religious minister would want to add to the sorry load that animals have to bear by refusing to stun an animal before killing it is beyond me. It is not unreasonable to ask them to test their own conscience on the matter.